Post (or respond) your thoughts/ideas about this Unit's reading and assignment in the Blackboard online discussion forum. Do not post your assignment there.

What you can do this unit

Professor Joseph Frank worked for over twenty-five years to publish his definitive, five-volume biography of
Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849; The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859;
The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865; The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871;
The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881), truly a magnificent work. Read some of Frank's
reflections on his long, and continuing, study of Dostoevsky in *.doc or *.pdf format.

For extra credit please suggest to your instructor a relevant video for this unit of the course. Send the title of the video, the url and a brief explanation of why you find the video interesting and applicable to the material that is being studied in this unit.

Extra Credit Options

For 50 points Maximum extra credit, Watch Anna
Karenina (1967) and
write a one-page paper about why your instructor thought that the film was so bad.

For 50 points maximum extra credit, watch
Voina i Mir (War and Peace), if you dare. Watch instead Love and Death (1975),
and write a one-page paper assessing Woody Allen's portrait of Russia in the age of the Napoleonic wars.

For
50 points maximum extra credit, compare and contrast the work of the
mighty three (Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and Turgenev) in a one-page paper. This might be
worth a lot more depending on how good your comparison is; I might accept longer than one page on this.

For 50 points maximum extra credit, in a one-page paper, identify some of the
unifying traits of the work of the Mighty Five (Milii
Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgskii, Aleksandr Borodin and Nikolai
Rimskii-Korsakov).

For 50 points maximum extra credit, identify some of the
salient characteristics of the work of Ilya Repin and the Peredvizhniki in a one-page paper.